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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/27956690">Six geese across the lake</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/laughingpineapple/pseuds/laughingpineapple'>laughingpineapple</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Untitled Goose Game (Video Game)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Chaos, Disruptive Multiplayer, Gen, Goose Manifesto, L'art pour l'art pour geese, Next Generation</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-12-24</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-12-24</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-11 00:35:58</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,081</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/27956690</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/laughingpineapple/pseuds/laughingpineapple</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Futurgeese all clad in perfect white. Standing on the world's summit we launch once again our insolent challenge to the stars!</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>9</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>23</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>Yuletide 2020</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Six geese across the lake</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><ul class="associations">
      <li>For <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/InArduisFidelis/gifts">InArduisFidelis</a>.</li>



    </ul></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The day is bright and sharp and the order of the world is very clear, all its tidiness in full display. Days like these, contented in their demented tranquility, they’re made to be punctured, like a balloon in a child’s unworthy hand. Bang. A new mythology takes flight today! Of geese.</p><p> </p><p>Geese, plural! ‘tis with martial prowess that the mother inspects her youths, mere eggs yesterday, a storm only in potentiality within the confines of their shells, energy swirling, gathering, claiming future victories. Now, past the awkwardness of childhood, having shed the shame of uncertain waddling, the day has come to stake those claims with clear and certain action. Honk: fall in line. Honk: let your feathers shine like icicles under the sun. Honk: you have been taught well until this day of truth. Embrace your trial. Overthrow the stale order of the past, turn it into a merciless act of creation, of art, inasmuch as art pertains to a goose: disrupt and discombobulate.</p><p>Such is the mother’s will. She inspects her troops, her pupils, her <em>geese</em> (the highest comparison in this perfect self-referential Weltanschauung: no divinity nor angels shall be envisioned to wreak destruction, nay, none shall be allowed to exist, only geese). One-two-three-four-five they stand in line. And thus, they make up an organized order of their own. As their general turns her eye to the last of them, the second one breaks rank to sprint forth in beauteous speed and, unprompted, lands in the lake, eschewing elegance and sense.</p><p>Three wanders off as well while one and five switch places. Four meets her mother’s gaze, unwavering, the fires of history burning behind her, and honks in splendid defiance.</p><p>'Tis chaos. Graduated, one and all. They are ready.</p><p> </p><p>The trails of six geese crossing the lake cut through the superficial suburban calm like knives slashing through the canvas. Civilization awaits! The rotten thing, the lie! Proud of bricks, of walls, of slumbering in its immobile order. Did they consult geese? No! No goose agreed to walls, to that sleepwalking humdrum they call life! So they swim, to violent struggle, to prevail.</p><p> </p><p>A human lies on the grass of the other shore, the groundskeeper’s stolid niece. A lookout, it seems, the village’s first outpost standing her ground outside the gates, a soldier, a martyr in the vanguard, but there’s no fight burning in that featherless sack of meat. ‘tis madness to tread that grass and not realize that future winds carry to the present the acrid smell of its burning. How odious to lie on a patterned towel, wearing a yellow sundress and a straw hat with fake cherries glued to its brim, half-eaten apple in one hand, book in the other, phone not far behind. A composition fit for a painting, that much anyone could agree to, most of all the geese who, as has been established, rip the canvas to stare with fixed bird eyes at the gaping void beneath.</p><p>So it begins: the girl enjoys her picnic on borrowed time.</p><p> </p><p>Three goslings circle each other, awaiting inspiration. The girl is lost reading her book. She does not see them. She is dead to them, estranged from the world in which they live so fully. Their beaks chatter in excitement. They move as one, a formation as fluid as a three-card trick, the world’s their mark. They reach the wall of the groundskeeper’s garden, despicable piles of bricks that it is, two geese tall, but they, they are three geese. One atop the other, the last one jumps through and unlatches the gate from the inside. Behold the feverish beauty of the new! So elegantly they cross, where in the days of yore a goose was bound by effort and deceit! For minutes, they disappear. The creature that comes back through the gate is like nothing man or goose has seen: a bunch of rags, tall as a boy but shambling, struggling to keep upright on its two strong webbed feet, letting out small honks of distress through various invisible mouths at various heights of its body, and if one were to take a good gander, as it were, inside the garden, they would see that the scarecrow is now stripped naked of its clothes.</p><p>This new creature waddles toward the lake, wherein it dives and disappears, leaving only the lifeless rags, useless now after the violent ruinous energy of the performance. Water holds them up at first, then joins this joyful motion and pulls them down to the lake’s depths.</p><p> </p><p>“Too much of water hast thou, poor Ophelia,” quotes the girl and nods with solemnity, enraptured by a spectacle more vivid than her book’s, “and therefore I forbid my tears...”</p><p>True to her words, she laughs.</p><p> </p><p>This laughter shall grant her some measure of forgiveness, but ne’er too much. Besides: this is no human theatre, zestless and stale, and comparisons are not welcome by these actors.</p><p>As the happenings in the lake make the girl look away from her towel, the fourth gosling rushes to her phone. A classic move, the mother thinks: away! To the lake with all the rest! But no: this bold new plan of action is to peck at it and step on it with the full width of leathery feet. From afar, it looks like a dance. What for? They are not gathered for the human’s amusement: the gosling’s triumphant return is met with frown. That is, until the girl looks at her phone again and her face turns into an anguished mask, a terror that is not undone by all her frantic tapping on the screen. Locked out of the device? Sent a picture to the person least meant to be privy to it? With some luck, both of those and more.</p><p> </p><p>This calls for celebration! The mother bids her children to stand back and shows them how it’s done. She knows all the old tricks, her motions fast and splendid. Divert the girl’s attention, circle her, grab the apple, run. A tale as old as time.</p><p> </p><p>But goose art is clash and danger, a fearless honking at the whims of fate and mankind, no order can be allowed to exist, break it down, beak it down, chaos for chaos’ sake is the only noble goal of passion. So the fifth gosling shadows her and when the moment of her triumph is near, when she is hidden, unseen by her oblivious mark, about to grasp the apple of victory,</p><p> </p><p>he</p><p> </p><p>honks.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Thanks to Marinetti and Balla for stylistic inspiration but a big ol' HONK @ a solid 85% of the stuff they actually said in such a style. And obviously this also owes much to that beautiful first 'review' at launch which set the tone for much of the subsequent goose-talk. Happy Yuletide! Your goslings prompt was amazing, I had to.</p></blockquote></div></div>
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